Our Nhongo Safaris guide for the next four days (Dean) picked us up from our hotel in Melville at 7:30am for the long drive to Nelspruit – a town at the southern end of Kruger. We then swapped from the minibus to a specially converted pickup truck with open sides for the last part of our journey into the park itself. Kruger is the oldest national park in the world, having been originally founded in 1898. It began as a smaller park before being joined with another nearby and eventually expanded to cover 4 million acres.
We stopped for lunch at one of the camps and then headed into the park for our first game drive. It wasn’t long before we came across some impala, a form of antelope. Their breeding season has just finished so there are currently around 400,000 in Kruger – we expect to see a lot of them over the next few days! Next we saw an elephant which are also very common, with around 13,000. They are apparently going through a population boom which is gradually causing problems within Kruger due to the rate at which they destroy trees and eat the vegetation.
During the rest of the afternoon we saw a chameleon, tortoise, waterbuck, kudu, zebra, vervet monkeys and a variety of birds. Our highlight though was finding a white rhino. Rhino is one of the “big five”, so called because they are the five most dangerous animals to hunt. The others are elephant, buffalo, lion and leopard. Unfortunately there is a big rhino poaching problem across South Africa, including Kruger. Over 500 rhinos have been killed for their horns this year alone.
For the next three nights we’re staying in the Nkambeni camp, just inside the perimeter of the park. It is fully run and staffed by the local community. Our rooms are ‘luxury tents’ – built with a mixture of wood and canvas. They are air conditioned and each have two outdoor showers as well as an indoor one. Before dinner we had time for a swim in the camp pool – the largest and warmest on our trip so far! A short distance away is another more natural pool which had three hippos standing just underneath the surface, occasionally popping their heads up for air. Surprisingly hippos are responsible for 95% of animal inflicted injuries to humans, so we’re quite glad that there is an electric fence surrounding our camp!
After trying the outdoor shower (which is very good!) we went for some drinks at the bar and an excellent buffet style dinner, again cooked by a viagra pfizer canada local chef. Then it was off to bed for an even earlier start tomorrow – breakfast is at 6am!
Sounds exciting.